About Meeco

Katryna Dow is the founder and CEO of Meeco. She has been pioneering personal data rights since 2002, when she envisioned a time when personal sovereignty, identity and contextual privacy would be as important as being connected. Now distributed ledger, personal clouds, mobile technology, AI, Internet-of-Things and regulation such as the GDPR and Open Banking have converged to make Meeco both possible and necessary.

In 2011, she co-founded a think tank and incubator to explore commercialisation and business models across the emerging personal information sector. In early 2012, she wrote the Meeco Manifesto, and confident in strategy development and business model she founded Meeco in August of the same year. Katryna initially self-funded Meeco, before raising seed capital in January 2014, enabling Meeco to launch its first public platform in July 2014.

Katryna speaks globally on privacy and data innovation and currently serves on two IEEE standards working groups; Co-Chair for the Personal Data and Privacy Committee, part of the Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems, and Chair for the new P7006 - Standard for Personal Data Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agent.

She is the co-author of the blockchain identity paper ‘Immutable Me’ and co-author/co-architect of Meeco’s distributed ledger solution and, most recently, the White Paper on Zero Knowledge Proofs for Access, Control, Delegation and Consent of Identity and Personal Data.

Prior to Meeco she founded and operated a strategy consulting practice. As a consultant, Katryna has extensive global experience in strategy to execution roles in start-ups to major corporate change and implementation and projects. Katryna has held leadership positions and delivered projects in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, United States and India. Her industry sector experience includes information technology, financial services, health services and human resources.

Katryna currently splits her time between Australia and Europe, where Meeco has offices and development teams.

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Greg Embleton is the Chairman of Meeco Planet Pty Ltd. Formally the CEO of Secure Value Exchange (SVX) Group, a major Meeco shareholder, which merged with Meeco in 2019.

Greg is a senior executive with over 35 years’ global technology and executive experience. He has held the role of CIO for a number of large Australian domestic and international corporations where he has been instrumental in leading substantial growth and transformational change programs. Some of the key companies and roles include held by Greg include:

• Global General Manager and CIO, Amcor
• CIO, RJR Nabisco (Australia)
• CIO, Sensis
• Executive Director & CIO, Australian Red Cross Blood Service
• Vice President, Novell (Australia Pacific)
• CEO, Byte

Greg has a track record of consistently delivering growth in both customer and shareholder value. Through his drive and direction, the companies under his control have received industry accolades and a number have been the subject of successful acquisition. His experience, knowledge and pragmatic approach is reflected in the respect he has earned across business and technology sectors in Australia.

Greg is a proven transformational leader who believes unreservedly in the importance of data security, privacy and data innovation. As Chairman, he brings this commitment and his extensive knowledge and experience to help Meeco realise its full potential.

Greg has tertiary qualifications in Information Technology and Accounting and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.  

In addition to being the Chairman of the Meeco Board, he is also the Chairman of Zedmed, and an Advisory Board Member for Davidsons Recruitment and Byte.

Victoria Richardson is the Chief Operating Officer at Meeco. She is responsible for helping Meeco to scale by driving investment in people, technology and processes.

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Victoria has been working with payment and identity technologies for over 20 years with experience in business development, product marketing and consulting. She has advised a range of companies from start ups to major banks, telcos and government bodies on the business implications of technology change.

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Most recently as the Chief Strategy Officer for Australia's self regulatory body for payments, Victoria drove the industry's focus on digital identity and data. In 2017, prior to the advent of the Consumer Data Right (Australia's economy wide version of open banking) Victoria led one of the banking industry's first data hackathons, which aimed to improve the lives of Australian's through the provision of services enabled by payments data. In 2019 she drafted the industry's Digital Identity Action Plan and led the development of the TrustID Framework, to support the delivery of the Plan. Based on open standards and aligned with CDR, TrustID is an interoperability domain, designed to enable competition and choice between multiple service providers.

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Victoria enjoys complex problem solving and driving consensus where there are disparate views; she knows that strong team work is at the heart of the best decisions.

Jan Vereecken is the Chief Product Officer at Meeco; a personal data & distributed ledger platform that enables people to securely exchange data via the API-of-Me with the people and organisations they trust.

In 2017, Jan co-founded Juru; a Belgium based start-up developing an identity platform using blockchain technology. The focus was to improve the administrative and privacy aspects of modern digital life, through reducing the friction of onboarding to new products and services.

In his role as Juru co-founder and technical leader, Jan defined the architecture for several projects at Digipolis. Projects involved GDPR management, a ‘Business Rules Engine’ product, that enabled Antwerp City to assign access and manage rights to (self) managed teams via their platform ecosystem of city services and a new Identity Provider solution, able to operate in a federated landscape, with a self-sovereign identity component.

Jan is an experienced IT professional with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) domain expertise. His focus has been on innovation within enterprise teams, leveraging his start-up and entrepreneurial experience in leading teams. Specifically, he was retained to develop solutions to manage costs and increase operational efficiency.

Prior to Meeco and Juru, Jan was involved in several other start-ups, responsible for the architecture design together with the development of software services. Throughout Jan’s IT career he has been involved in ventures where he was responsible for determining the underlying technology decisions that would enable performance at scale.

It is this expertise that he brings to his role at Meeco; directing the development of products, application of patents and integration with SVX that form the Meeco API platform.

Jan is actively involved in applying the Standards from various working groups including verified claims, consent management and identity. Together with active participation in the blockchain community.

Expertise: Enterprise integration, open standards, mobile computing platforms, patents in presence based network entities

Derek is passionate about how technology can change the world for a better future. He has developed and implemented solutions across Australia and around the globe. From developer to chief technology officer, to investor and chief executive officer, Derek has a broad view of technology past, present and future.

As the Head of Engineering since Meeco’s inception, Derek provides architectural and technical leadership for the Meeco platform ensuring the technology underpinning Meeco is not only consistent with the organization’s goals and objectives but also adapting and scaling to the changing needs of the emerging global personal data marketplace. He has been instrumental in building and maturing all software and API development of the Meeco platform and of the Meeco Labs testing and learning environment. With vast experience in all aspects of the software lifecycle across industries such as media, telecommunications, finance and government, Derek brings a passion and dedication to developing innovative software that scales.

Derek has driven privacy and data consent projects for Meeco, including with two global telecommunications companies, two Australian telecommunications and media companies, two multinational financial services corporation, an Australian postal company and a European telecommunications company.

Prior to Meeco, Derek's experience included responsibility for the successful delivery of Telstra's Project Chameleon, a user personalized mobile portal; Eccosphere, a social utility for mobile devices; Australian Marine Catalogue, a harmonization of marine spatial data infrastructure; among others.

Derek led the Meeco team to win best project for the August 2017 Australian Payments Council Sydney Hackathon for the implementation of a loyalty concept on top of the Open Bank Project APIs.

Expertise: Erlang, Elixir, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, React, Postgresql, AWS, Linux server administration

Yuri is an experienced software development generalist with a extensive track record of projects and technologies used.

Yuri started his career in 1999 working as a Computational Linguist. He worked in areas such as developing a formal grammar for English, a Part-Of-Speech tagset and a tagger for German, resolution of anaphoric relations in English patents, and focus resolution in questions in a Natural Language interface for a search engine.

Having written quite a number research prototypes, Yuri got fascinated by more industrial software development and in 2002 he quit the domain of Computational Linguistics and began his career as a software developer.

Throughout his career Yuri used a number of technologies such as Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, Javascript, and AWS working on web applications and web services for various small and medium size businesses in Belgium, and mobile application backends.

Yuri developed and maintained an open-source Ruby On Rails plugin which was downloaded more than 267,000 times from the Rubygems package repository.

Pursuing his interest in distributed and concurrent programming Yuri co-founded an Elixir meetup group in Brussels in 2014.

His current software stack is the Erlang platform with which he seeks to tame software complexity with Event Sourcing, Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) patterns, and test-driven development.

Expertise: Ruby, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Javascript, React, Redux, AWS

Linas is an ambitious information technology enthusiast with a solid experience in software development.

Linas started as a HTML5 game developer Linas and gained substantial knowledge in Javascript and UI development.

He was a member of a team which received investments from Microsoft and Nokia and won the AppCampus Grant 2014 for a HTML5 based strategy game.

During the following years of his career, Linas worked on a number of projects. He gained a range of technical skills developing, deploying and maintaining mobile application backends, implementing responsive designs and integrating API’s.

Linas is enthusiastic about clean and quality code and he follows the best practices of test and behaviour driven development.

Focusing mainly on web development, Linas is also keen on exploring and learning about the latest trends in other technologies.

Expertise: Java (Spring), C# (.NET),  DevOps , CI/CD – JENKINS, AWS,  JavaScript, TypeScript, AngularJS, Angular2+, JQuery, Ionic 2+, RDBMS, NOSQL

Vijay is a passionate full-stack senior developer with strong technical experience.

He has a passion to get things done, and also comfortable delivering across strategy and tactical execution with the ability to work as a member of a multidisciplinary team.

He has been involved closely with SVX to conceive, design, build, test and deploy the full-stack solutions. Prior to working with SVX, he helped develop a full-stack solution to small companies and enterprises.

Yolanda is a Product Manager at Meeco with a strong focus on user research and Human Centred Design principles. At the centre of her design philosophy is a thorough understanding of data collection and user interactions and how she can bring them together to create thoughtful design solutions. She believes that a holistic approach to designing processes is key to delivering unique and powerful memories for people. By understanding a user or, group of users (their needs and the way they view their surroundings), allows her to deliver tailored designs extending across a vast range of disciplines.

Yolanda brings over ten years of design experience to Meeco, having previously worked in the interior design, architecture and visualisation professions.

Currently undertaking her Master of Education, specialising in Learning Design, Yolanda is able to develop her social-science research methodologies and the psychological development of learners to aid her UX practice.

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Monique joined Meeco after having worked in an advisory capacity in her role as a director at NPR Group Accounts & Advisors.

Following a Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com) Accounting and Finance from Deakin University, Monique then went on to complete her Graduate Diploma of Charted Accounting through the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia. She has over a decade of Finance, Tax, Accounting and Advisory experience, having worked extensively with start-ups, assisting them with Marketing Exports and RnD Grants.

Monique manages finance across Meeco's Australian, UK and Belgian registered companies.

Vivienne has lived and worked in Australia, the United States, Hong Kong, China and has been based in the United Kingdom for the past 20 years.

She has a professional background in psychology and occupational health, and has worked in clinical research for over 15 years and clinical trials for the past 5 years.

Vivienne has worked in a range of different occupational settings from clinical practice, the building and construction industry, manufacturing and healthcare including two years as a Health Systems Consultant for Procter & Gamble for 2 years in the Asia Pacific Region.

Her qualifications include a Masters in Occupational Health and Safety (University of Sydney), an MBA from Heriot-Watt (UK) and a PhD (University of London).

Working in clinical trials means that Vivienne is well aware of the importance of individual consent to use clinical and healthcare information and the regulations around the use of personal data.

In her research management role she has worked with a range of stakeholders in the healthcare industry including academic, public sector and commercial organisations to develop data capture, secure management systems and bespoke databases for collecting and managing research data.  Some of these trials have included the use and development of apps to capture medical and health related information.

In her current role in clinical research operations Vivienne is part of the Barts COVID Delivery and Operational Group setting up Covid-19 research across the Barts Trust including the new Nightingale Hospital.
In clinical trials participants have to consent for their data to be used, for what purpose and for how long it can be kept.

There is a balance between privacy for the individual’s data and allowing access to researchers who can use it to answer important research questions and ultimately improve health outcomes for everyone.

Vivienne’s research approach is based on best practice for data privacy and consistent with Meeco’s philosophy to create mutual value and ensure explicit and informed consent is always required by when sharing personal data.

Paul has spent 34 years in the professional accounting and advisory arena with PricewaterhouseCoopers. He retired from the Partnership of PwC Australia in 2011, (26 years as a Partner) and formed a boutique Corporate Advisory, Strategy and Restructuring practice, Collins Pitt Associates. Paul has also spent two years as a Special Advisor to Lazard Australia, one of Australia’s premier boutique M&A and Corporate Advisory firms.

For the past 45 years Paul has specialised in the area of corporate advice, turnaround & restructuring, profit improvement, M&A, strategic advice, risk and governance, forensic accounting and insolvency management.

Paul’s passion for this field of expertise has led him to work in many countries around the world. The pinnacle of his career was being appointed to the role of Global leader of PwC’s Crisis Management Division which was the largest restructuring, turnaround and forensics practice in the world with over 240 partners, 2,400 staff and operations in 62 countries with global revenues of circa A$1 billion. Paul led the practice for four years from both the Tokyo and New York offices of PwC.

Paul is an innovative and strategic thinker and has demonstrated an ability to lead large organizations and achieve significant top and bottom-line growth within the companies he has worked.

Whilst Paul, through his consultancy practice, Collins Pitt Associates, still provides specialist advice on profit enhancement, turnarounds, business processes, asset and investment management; his experience over the years this has led to a NED career with a strong focus on corporate entity financial performance, governance, and risk management.

Paul is currently a director of a number of companies in the Australian Unity Group. He is also a director of several private companies including Meeco and sits on the Investment Committee of three large corporates and not for profit entities.

An experienced senior IT leader with a focus on leadership and connecting business strategy to IT initiative. An empathetic people leader with a demonstrated track record of developing and nurturing top talent with extensive experience in running multiple IT disciplines; Cloud Engineering, Database Administration and Engineering, DevOps, Information Security, Operations, Delivery, Incident Management and Helpdesk.

Project Manager at Meeco